The Itanium Solutions Blog

I read with interest Ashlee Vance’s recent article in the NY Times, where according to sources, Sun is canceling its Rock chip project after 5 years of development work at a cost estimated in the billions. For all those Sun customers who have been patiently waiting and delaying server purchases in anticipation of Rock, this has to be a huge disappointment. Jon Stokes of Ars Technica further speculates that if Rock has fallen by the wayside, in the long run can SPARC be far behind? In any case we will all be following the latest developments from Oracle as they move forward to absorb Sun. In the meantime I encourage IT decision makers looking for a “rock solid” mission-critical computing platform to visit the Alliance site, check out the Itanium platform and hear from customers the positive impact Itanium-based solutions are having on their businesses.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance announced today its panel of high-profile industry leaders who will serve as judges for this year’s Itanium Innovation Awards competition. Having  this  high quality panel of industry visionaries evaluating and selecting category winners provides an increased level of credibility to this prestigious global competition. Read bios of our judging panel here. This year’s judges include:

· Joe B. Alexander, strategy and technology consultant; educator
· Ken Cayton, president, Systematic Market Analysis
· Jon Erickson, editor in chief, Dr. Dobb’s
· Dr. Barry Hieb, chief scientist, Global Patent Identifiers
· Sverre Jarp, chief technology officer, CERN openlab
· Dr. Rinaldo Jose, president and co-founder, Lakeway Technologies
· George McQuilken co-founder, eCoast Angels Investment Network
· Michelle (Mickey) Pierce, senior product manager, Mainframe Migration Alliance, Microsoft
· Dr. Andrew Razeghi, lecturer, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
· Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group
· Dr. Mark K. Smith, executive director, Universal Parallel Computing Research Center and managing director, Gelato Federation
 · Michael Vizard, director of strategic content, Ziff-Davis Enterprise

Our goal is to recognize excellence and innovation in use of Itanium systems to solve complex and challenging computing problems. Judges will evaluate submissions in four categories: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, Computationally Intensive applications, and Humanitarian Impact.

Deadline for entries is Wednesday, June 3, 2009. For more information on submissions visit the Innovation Awards microsite. We will recognize our winners at a celebration in their honor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art  in September during Intel’s fall IDF. If you will be at IDF and are interested in attending the event, please send us an email awards@itaniumsolutions.com.

Last week Intel announced a delay in the shipment of its next generation Itanium processor, code-named Tukwila, until the first quarter of  2010. While this news is disappointing to some industry observers, it will have a minimal impact on the work the Alliance is doing this year. We are currently hard at work reviewing applications for the 2009 Innovation Awards program and creating new Itanium-focused content in support of our Q2 technology theme, Data Center Modernization which includes IT Consolidation as well as mainframe migration opportunities for which Itanium is particularly well suited.

The fundamental strengths of the Itanium architecture remain its reliability, availability, and serviceability features (RAS) that are fundamental to mission-critical computing. Customers continue to extol the tangible benefits and results their Itanium-based solutions deliver. And based on the latest data from IDC and Gartner, demand for current generation of Itanium processors is strong.

The Alliance looks forward to working with Intel and its key OEMs in support of the Tukwila launch next year and in continuing to serve as a central source for Itanium successes, content, and resources. For more information on the Tukwila delay, see the following articles in CNET by Gordon Haff and vnunet.com by David Neal.

I had the pleasure to speak with some  leading press and analysts who cover the high end server and solutions business during our recent Alliance press tour.  We had full schedule of visits starting on the West Coast and then moving east to New York and Boston. The quality of these conversations was excellent. On the Itanium side, we wanted to share the very positive 2008 data from IDC and Gartner that highlighted Itanium’s impressive growth in both revenue and shipments on a global basis coupled with market share gains against both IBM Power and Sun SPARC. We discussed the areas where Itanium is seeing great traction including Mission-Critical Data (such as Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence),  Data Center  Modernization (including IT consolidation and  moving selected workloads off legacy mainframes), and Computationally Intensive applications.

We talked about the Alliance’s use of social networking sites and techniques to reach the broader Itanium community and provided an update on our Innovation Awards program. Followers of the Alliance including press and analysts were able to track our progress on Twitter and hear interesting insights from our meetings as we moved cross country.  Hot topics included the use of social networking for business benefit, thoughts on the future of the “new” Oracle, and what opportunities cloud computing might provide for Itanium as it evolves.

In addition to building valuable relationships, the tour also resulted in some interesting coverage from Internet News and ServerWatch.  Additional coverage was generated from our press release in a number of on-line industry publications.

I would like to express my thanks to everyone who took the time to meet with us for candidly sharing their insights and I look forward to continuing  discussions in the future.

As the dust settles around what could possibly be Oracle’s most interesting acquisition to date, lots of questions remain. Most industry observers agree that the deal provides some great benefits to Oracle given the software “jewels” that Oracle will acquire including Java,  Solaris,  mySQL and others. As Larry Ellison said himself in the press release: “Java is the single most important software we’ve ever acquired.” Considering all the software Oracle has acquired over the years, that’s quite a statement.

What has been the subject of much speculation is what Oracle will do with the Sun hardware.  Based on a recent statement, Larry Ellison confirmed his commitment to Sun’s hardware business. At this juncture it’s really the only thing he could say without risking damage to a significant component of the acquisition. It will be interesting to see how well Oracle can play the server hardware game (with which it has no experience), how long it will play it, and how being in the server business will affect its on-going relationships with its other server platform provider customers/business partners.

Regardless of the outcome, I believe that the current state of affairs is certainly a positive development for Itanium. I imagine some long-term Sun customers are taking a long, hard look at their future computing direction. Uncertainty breeds opportunity.  Itanium has seen some significant marketshare gains against SPARC over the past several years and I expect this trend to continue. Information about migrating to the Itanium architecture can be found on the Alliance website.